Currently, various countries are enacting or enforcing regulations for restricting use of a specific constituent. Such the regulation include the RoHS (Restriction on Hazardous Substances) directive or the ELV directive (End of Life Vehicles Directive) in the EU. In this situation, management of constituents contained in a product is urgent necessity for product manufacturers. In particular, a method for certificating non-containment of a prohibited constituent has become an issue for each of the manufactures.
Assemblers and the like generally do not manufacture components in their own factories and employ process of purchasing the components from component manufacturers and the like, and then assemblers assemble a product with the purchased components. In this case, for example, the assembler requests the suppliers to provide with constituent information of the components constituting the product so as to obtain constituent information of the product which is manufactured by the assembler. In response to such a requirement, the green procurement movement has recently been promoted in manufacturers so as to urge component suppliers (hereinafter, referred to simply as “suppliers”; including component venders and component manufacturers) to investigate and provide constituent information of components. The provided information is accumulated in a component information database of the product manufacturer.
In order to confirm constituent information of components, a designer in the manufacturer or the like searches for information of a target component from the component information database to confirm the component information so as to decide on a component as a component for constituting a product. In many cases, however, not all the component information that the designer wants to know is provided by the suppliers. In addition, even if the component information is registered, the registered contents are insufficient, information quality differs between the suppliers, or some suppliers provide the component information without conducting full investigation thereof. Moreover, since each supplier has a different idea about constituent information, the quality of provided constituent information frequently varies depending on the suppliers which provide the constituent information. However, since there is no means of examining such component information quality at present, it is impossible to fully examine whether or not a target component conforms to regulations. Accordingly, the conformity of a component to environmental regulations (hereinafter, referred to simply as “conformity”) cannot be precisely evaluated.
In view of such a situation, the assemblers try to ensure the credibility of information by a method of obliging the suppliers to submit non-containment certificates or the like. However, an amount of information available at early stages of design is limited in many cases. Therefore, the assemblers are required to evaluate the credibility of components based on a limited amount of constituent information provided by the suppliers at early stages of design to confirm the conformity of the components to the environmental regulations.
As a technology of evaluating the credibility of components, Japanese Patent Laid-open Publication No. 2004-038656, “Product design support device and method”, proposes a product design support device which has functions of designating a range of a specification value to search for a component satisfying the range of the specification value as a recommended component and of accepting the registration made by a designer in terms of a recommended component to give the recommended component higher priority to be selected as a recommended component for the next component search.
Japanese Patent Laid-open Publication No. H 11-238069, “Component selection device”, discloses a component selection device which has functions of searching a database for alternative components for a certain component designated by an item code and of deriving a recommendation ranking of the alternative components based on data such as reliability, cost, an inventory condition of the alternative components for the certain component.
Japanese Patent Laid-open Publication No. 2002-049649, “Environment information simulation system, device, and method, and recorded medium”, describes an environment information simulation system which has the function of evaluating a conformity status of a certain component, even if whose constituent information has not been registered to environment regulations, by using a weighted average value of constituent information of similar components as constituent information of the certain component.
Japanese Patent Laid-open Publication No. 2003-203105, “Product check system, information setting check device, product-related information providing device, and product check support device”, discloses a product check system and the like having the following function. In the product check system, a database is created which includes information on components most likely to be contained by each type of component. Upon input of a constituent that should be reported, a supplier also inputs the type of the component. With respect to the type of the component thus input, a constituent that is highly likely to be contained in the component is extracted from the database to be compared with the input constituent content. When no constituent corresponding to the report is extracted from the database, a message is sent to the reporter so as to prompt reconfirmation.
Throughout this specification, the term “component” denotes both a “part” which constitutes a product and demonstrates a part of a function of the product and a “material” which signifies a raw material necessary for manufacturing the part. The term “constituent” denotes a physical constituent element necessary for producing the material. For example, a chemical substance is one of the constituents.
The systems and devices described in the above-cited documents are for estimating component information of a target component based on information of components similar to the target component (Japanese Patent Laid-open Publication No. 2002-049649) or extracting a recommended component from the specifications designated by a designer (Japanese Patent Laid-open Publication No. 2004-038656 and Japanese Patent Laid-open Publication No. H 11-238069). However, the systems and devices cannot evaluate the accuracy of the similar component information, that is, the accuracy of the component information provided by the supplier to output the result of evaluation.
Moreover, in the case where the constituent information of the component information to be evaluated is estimated using the similar component information to verify the conformity of the target component, there is no means of verifying whether the result of evaluation of the conformity is credible or not. Therefore, even if the result of evaluation of the conformity is obtained, it is sometimes difficult to perfectly avoid the risk of inconformity to regulations, because the credibility of the result of evaluation is not definite.
Furthermore, even if the result of evaluation of the conformity of the target component is obtained, there is no means of ensuring that the target component can avoid the risk of inconformity to regulations. Moreover, in the above-cited related art, if the target component turns out not to conform to the regulations, the designer is required to select a target component again. Therefore, a large number of steps are needed for the designer to select a component, which impairs efficiency.